A hundred is a round number, and round numbers make for easy headlines. Bacon Park Golf Course opened in 1926, which puts 2026 squarely on the anniversary calendar, and if you've driven down Skidaway Road this year you've probably seen a banner or two marking it. But the number that actually explains what's different about the course right now isn't 100. It's 12, and it's set out in a city contract.
If you live anywhere near Bacon Park, whether you golf there or just drive past it on the way to the soccer fields, that contract is the more useful thing to understand. One corner of this 500-acre complex has been visibly rebuilt over the past decade while the rest of it has stayed exactly the same. The contract also tells you something about what's coming next.
A Century, Then a Decade of Quiet Repair
Bacon Park Golf Course sits at 1 Shorty Cooper Drive, part of a much larger public recreation tract that runs along Skidaway Road and Bacon Park Drive. The course itself was laid out by Donald Ross, the architect behind some of the most recognizable municipal and private courses in the country, and for most of its history it played the way a lot of 1920s municipal courses do: a reliable neighborhood fixture that aged the way public infrastructure ages, with maintenance keeping pace with budget rather than ambition.
As WTOC reported, that changed in 2014, when the City of Savannah brought in O.C. Welch Golf Properties to manage the course under a 12-year contract. Golf course architect Richard Mandell led a restoration that earned the 2016 Renovation of the Year award in the public course category from Golf Inc. Magazine, and O.C. Welch has since put more than $8 million into the course, the pro shop, and the lighted driving range along Shorty Cooper Drive.
If you've played the course, or read through the reviews on GolfPass, you've probably seen the pattern show up in real time. Golfers who'd written the greens off a few years ago as overrun with poa annua and inconsistent Bermuda started coming back and noticing tees and fairways in genuinely good shape, with the greens improving in visible stages rather than all at once. That unevenness isn't a complaint about the work. It's what a decade-long capital project actually looks like from the outside: patchy, ongoing, and never quite finished on any single visit.
The Twelve-Year Contract
Here's the part that turned 2026 into more than a birthday. That original 12-year management contract was set to expire this year, right alongside the anniversary, and in February the City of Savannah agreed to extend it. O.C. Welch keeps the course. The city added a pledge of additional support on top of the renewal.
That's the actual news. An anniversary is a date on a calendar. A contract renewal is a bet that the same operator keeps spending money on the same 27 holes for years to come, which is a very different signal than a one-time makeover timed to a centennial photo. If the city had wanted to mark 100 years with a ribbon-cutting and call it done, this was the moment to let the contract lapse and reset expectations. Instead, the arrangement under which more than $8 million has already been spent just got extended rather than closed out.
For anyone who lives in the neighborhood and has watched the driving range lights come on more evenings than they used to, or noticed the pro shop looking less tired than it did five years ago, those visible changes are one part of the picture; how the rest of the park is funded is another.
Why Only Half the Park Got the Facelift
Bacon Park is bigger than its golf course, and that's easy to forget if golf isn't your thing. The full complex includes tennis courts, an archery range, ball fields, Memorial Stadium, the Chatham County Soccer Complex, the Paul Anderson-Howard Cohen Weightlifting Center, and the Allen E. Paulson Softball Complex, all sitting on the same 500 acres. None of that runs under the same arrangement as the golf course.
| Part of Bacon Park | Who runs it | What's changed since 2014 |
|---|---|---|
| Golf course, pro shop, driving range, practice facility | O.C. Welch Golf Properties, under a renewed city management contract | More than $8 million invested; 2016 Renovation of the Year award for the Richard Mandell restoration |
| Archery range, ball fields, tennis courts, Memorial Stadium, Chatham County Soccer Complex, weightlifting and softball complexes, the Bacon Park Forest walking trail | City of Savannah, as standard public parkland | Runs on the city's general parks budget, without a comparable multi-year capital contract |
That split explains a texture of the park that longtime residents already sense without necessarily naming it. The golf side has seen a steady drip of visible investment over the course of a contract lasting more than a decade. The rest of the park, including the walking trail through Bacon Park Forest that plenty of non-golfing neighbors actually use more often than the fairways, operates on the same funding rhythm as any other city facility. Neither model is wrong. They're just different clocks running under one address, and the anniversary banners only tell you about one of them.
The Name on the Map Depends on Who's Making It
One more wrinkle worth knowing if you've ever tried to look this place up. Some real estate and demographic sites file the Bacon Park area under the older subdivision name Sandfly, tied to its 31406 zip code, while local event listings and city communications group the golf course with Savannah-Midtown instead. Neither label is incorrect. They're just drawing the neighborhood line differently depending on whether the source is working from platting records or from how people who actually live nearby talk about their own address.
If you've ever searched for information about this stretch of Savannah and gotten conflicting results about what neighborhood it's technically in, that's why. The ground didn't move. The naming conventions just never fully agreed with each other, which is a pretty common quirk in a city old enough to have had multiple names for the same patch of land at different points in its history.
What This Means If You're Nearby
None of this changes what Bacon Park is on a Saturday morning: a place to play 18, walk a loop through the forest trail, or watch a Chatham County soccer match. But if you've noticed the golf course looking sharper than it did a few years back, now you know it wasn't a one-season push for a birthday party. The golf course has changed over the past decade, while the other half of the park is going to keep running on its own separate, slower clock regardless of how the golf side performs.
That's worth knowing if you live in the neighborhood and plan to keep living in it for a while. The city has renewed the golf course's management contract, so the arrangement continues rather than reaching a closing chapter.
If you're thinking about what a home near Bacon Park, Midtown, or anywhere else in the Savannah area is actually worth, or you just want a straight answer about the neighborhood before you make a move, Marjorie Wester is glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.
